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June 12, 2014

Contain Yourself

I'm going to repeat myself a little bit. Some of the best advice I ever heard came from my brother. He said not to tell people what you're going to do. Do something. Then tell people what you did. Well, it wasn't all me at all, but I played some part in Full360's evolution of the ElasticBI Framework, which is starting to be something we can tell people about. Over here at Cubegeek, I'm doing a little amateur marketing and communications.

So part of the whole ElasticBI PaaS Framework involves how we stand up application-specific stacks. And then we have to load balance them. And then we have to make them elastic. And then we have to secure them and all that stuff. We are building half a datacenter for every new customer. I put that work under the header of Virtualization & Orchestration.

VIrtualizationVirtualization is about creating the compute resources that are fungible to the cloud and to our dev workstations. It's the small grain of the cloud computing. Virtualization is about making boxes.

OrchestrationOrchestration is about configuring stuff on the fly, keeping track of all virtual resources in an application. It's the larger grain of cloud computing. Orchestration is about maintaining the size of the swarm of boxes.

In the news this week, Google admits that we are right by following our lead. (Heh) You see for several months now, we've been using Docker as part of our V&O strategy. Along with Docker we are also using:

Chef

Packer

Consul

VirtualBox

VMWare

Vagrant

Now I could go into all of that, but it's actually not my department, and I don't want to tell you about what I will do before I do it. But I will tell you that we have in place a lot of docker hosts and containerize all of our applications, and by applications I mean Data Management & ETL. The databases themselves, we tend to run a bit closer to the metal. However, we have recently made very impressive strides in our orchestration chops. Stay tuned here and at Full360.com and elsewhere so that when actually blow our particular horns, you'll know about it.